Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything...death is not...It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back...a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes no sound... - Tom Stoppard
The days of the digital watch are numbered. - Tom Stoppard
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. - Tom Stoppard
If you want to change something by Tuesday, theater is no good. Journalism is what does that.But, if you want to just alter the chemistry of the moral matrix, then theater has a longer half-life. - Tom Stoppard
Knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth. - Tom Stoppard
It's better to be quotable than to be honest. - Tom Stoppard
I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity. - Tom Stoppard
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I'm the kind of person who embarks on an endless leapfrog down the great moral issues. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation. - Tom Stoppard
Atheism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God. - Tom Stoppard
It is better to be quotable than to be honest. - Tom Stoppard
All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque. - Tom Stoppard
If an idea's worth having once, it's worth having twice. - Tom Stoppard
Hotel rooms inhabit a separate moral universe. - Tom Stoppard
Revolution is a trivial shift in the emphasis of suffering. - Tom Stoppard
We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered. - Tom Stoppard
The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means. - Tom Stoppard
A healthy attitude is contagious but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier. - Tom Stoppard
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity. - Tom Stoppard
Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible! - Tom Stoppard
The truth is always a compound of two half- truths, and you never reach it, because there is always something more to say. - Tom Stoppard
We are tied down to a language that makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style. - Tom Stoppard
Words are sacred. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones, in the right order, you can nudge the world a little. - Tom Stoppard
Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end? - Tom Stoppard
No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death. - Tom Stoppard
What freedom means, is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour's freedom to sing a different tune in his. - Tom Stoppard
We're actors - we're the opposite of people. - Tom Stoppard
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art. - Tom Stoppard
Septimus: There is nothing more to be said about sexual congress.Thomasina: Is it the same as love?Septimus: Oh no, it is much nicer than that. - Tom Stoppard
I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to the death your right to say it. - Tom Stoppard
It's not the voting that's democracy, it's the counting. - Tom Stoppard
If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation. - Tom Stoppard